Ian Dury was another who partly surfed the punk wave, but did so with added humour and wit. The lyric to Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, as well as being a showcase for uncommon rhyming, contrives to be both meaningless and profound at the same time while still carrying a strong undertone of sleaze but the song is perhaps too well known for use here.
Ian Dury and the Blockheads: Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3
Then there’s What a Waste, with its immortal line, “I could be the ticket man at Fulham Broadway Station,” a perfect iambic heptameter – as are several others in the song. Sublime.
Mac Davis is perhaps best known for writing In The Ghetto which Elvis made into a big hit.
Beginning To Feel The Pain was a song that I remembered fondly from the 70s though I never heard it for years afterwards. The opening lines and the refrain were what particularly stuck with me.
I couldn’t find the song on You Tube when I first delved into that Pandora’s Box. Someone’s put it up there now though.
In hindsight it tips over a bit into schmaltz with the strings towards the end.
Last week I heard a DJ on Radio 2 saying when Agnetha came to sing this song for Abba she must have said to Björn and Benny, “The lyric on this is insane! It doesn’t scan or rhyme.”
I think this lyric is fantastic, precisely because of the rhymes and scansion.
The rhyme scheme for the first verse is AABB*CC*DEFF* (where the * is for a part rhyme – which is more than common in popular music.) Moreover the D and E lines have an internal rhyme of lunch with bunch. Indeed, if you consider the line break is at “lunch” – which verses 2 and 3 suggest is more correct – the rhyme scheme becomes a near perfect AABB*CCDDEE.
The second and third verses both have an absolute AABBCCDDEE rhyming.
As to the scanning; it’s brilliant. In fact the line, “Undoubtedly I must have read the evening paper then,” is a wonderful iambic heptameter.
“There’s not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn’t see,” is superb; the best line in any Abba song bar none. If you allow the “see-ee” at the end as an iamb it’s also a near perfect iambic nonameter.
The only thing I dislike about the lyric is it’s written in USian. Gotten is now archaic in British English – except for the phrase “ill-gotten gains” – and we don’t say “to go” but “to take away” or, in Scotland, “to carry out.” But then “to go” provides the rhyme.
Plus there’s an element of SF to it all, with the looking back to something that has changed, the implication of a life transformed.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Blancmange version.
Last week I watched a TV programme about Dave Davies of the Kinks. In it he said his brother Ray had been playing two notes on the piano and he (Dave) thought that he could do something with it. To get the right effect – not the clean recorded sound they had had up to this – he tried cutting his amp’s loudspeakers with a razor blade, not expecting this to work. The result ended up as You Really Got Me. So maybe it was Dave, and not Ray, who invented heavy metal. Maybe.
The following programme was a retrospective of Kinks performances from the BBC archive which included this gem.
Not a hit at the time – nor was the LP from which it came despite it being a critical success and now much revered – The Village Green Preservation Society prefigures Ray’s movement into the chronicling of Englishness. It hits perfectly that note of wistful nostalgia encompassed by John Major quoting Orwell’s remark about old maids bicycling to Holy Communion. But Ray’s lyrics are a bit more amusing.
I remember Barclay James Harvest – one of the long gone Stuart Henry‘s favourites – from Early Morning, their first single, onwards.
It wasn’t till I finally bought the album Everyone Is Everybody Else that I realised that the jingle which Henry used to play on his Saturday morning Radio 1 show,
“So goodbye, pleased to know you,
We had some laughs along the way,
But I have to be leaving,
And there’s nothing you can do to make me stay,”
came from the track Poor Boy Blues.
I’m Over You is from 1972, around the time when their record deal with EMI’s Harvest label (which was said to be named after them – though that may be an urban myth) was running down.
It gained some airplay (Johnnie Walker’s record of the week I think) but sank almost without trace.
It’s one of those songs where the lyric seems to be saying the opposite of its apparent meaning.
I haven’t been able to find a video for this but I did find a site where you can play the track. The link leads to it.
For some reason I had remembered this as being from 1970 but it was actually 1969.
According to Wikipedia Pete Townshend called it a “clumsy piece of writing.” Whether that comment relates to the music or lyric is not entirely clear.
I tend to the lyric as the intro (in a style much imitated later by U2) is a classic bit of rock guitar; and the booming out of that first loud note made the song instantly unforgettable.
Like Georgie Fameâs Peaceful this is another one of those understated 1960s tracks. It was only a minor hit in the UK (see link below.)
98.6 on its release was considered by some to be the archetypical song of its time.
Itâs also said (and mentioned in Keithâs Wiki entry) that its title refers to the human body temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. To my mind that allusion in the lyric is more than a little strained.
I caught the preamble to Call Me Dave’s launch of the Conservatives’ manifesto today. Over the PA they were playing all sorts of songs with “change,” “changes” or “better” in their lyrics – except of course D:Ream.
Did the Tories have permission to do this?
One of the songs was Bowie’s Changes, which contains the line “Don’t want to be a richer man.”
I don’t suppose Dave does: he comes from money and took good care to marry even more.
The song also has, “You’ve left us up to our necks in it.” Was this a prediction, Dave?
